


Certificate in Applied Badass

by halfeatenmoon



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Roller Derby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 09:20:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/860510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the week, Britta has two part time jobs to juggle and bad dates to go on. Shirley has a business to run and kids to get to school.</p><p>On Saturday afternoons, they leave that all behind when they pull on their skates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Certificate in Applied Badass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aphrodite_mine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/gifts).



> This is one of those stories that didn't turn out at all the way I wanted it to. Maybe the fic I wanted it to be will still get written one day, but I think this turned into a cool little thing in its own right, and I hope it satisfies. The truth is, it was a joy to write!
> 
> It does use a bit of roller derby jargon, but nothing that you couldn't find in the most basic of derby glossaries. If you want a super quick overview of gameplay, I recommend [this comic](http://www.kcrollerwarriors.com/images/aboutus/rulespage08.gif). (Though this fic contains no Die master to punish repeat penalty box visitors, so don't get your hopes up about that.)

The moment before the first jam always felt a unreal. Britta was balanced on her toe stops, front of the pack because the white team had gotten the back wall, the fuckers, and one of their blockers was pressed right up against her back. She found her head buzzing with thoughts, as always, as she gripped her fellow blocker's shoulder, trying to think through tactics and plays and remember who was jamming and oh for fuck's sake would they just blow the whistle already, all while her opponent was breathing heavily, distractingly over her shoulder.

Then the whistle blew, she launched herself forward, and postponed all other thinking until the end of the jam.

*

Ever since she'd picked up roller derby, six months after graduating from Greendale, Saturdays had been Britta's haven. The rest of the week she could worry about her life, working different hours at two different community counseling centers and using her free time to look for a permanent job, a schedule that drove her into the ground. But not on Saturdays. She'd lie in bed with her cats, eventually do some grocery shopping and her laundry, get some lunch ready for when Shirley came around, grumbling about how the sandwich shop was good business but she didn't even want to _look_ at another one all day. Then she'd gather up her gear, shove it in the trunk of Shirley's car, and they'd drive down to the rink.

Saturday afternoons were scrimmage time for the Greendale Roller Derby League, with every skater in the league jumping in, splitting randomly into two teams and then doing their best to beat the hell out of each other as they skated laps of the dusty roller hockey rink on the outskirts of town. They had permanent teams, the teammates they trained with during the week, plotting for the once-a-month bout public bout when they'd get out their good uniforms and skate head to head - as well as trying to sell tickets and make some damn money back. On Saturdays, though, they were all skaters together, league-mates, derby sisters who were all in this together.

But scrimmaging against some of her usual teammates didn't change the fact that Britta wanted to hipcheck the shit out of them.

*

They were halfway around the track when the white team's jammer made her first break for freedom, with Britta's teammate still struggling at the back of the pack. The white jammer had gone for the inside, pushing some of Britta's teammates even further ahead of her. She was about to haul ass around the outside lane to try and catch up when she threw a glance over her shoulder and saw her own jammer, Slam Perkins, struggling to force her way through two of the white team's blockers. With barely a second to make up her mind, Britta pushed her heels outwards, slowing suddenly, and shoved her shoulder into one blocker's sternum. Slam wriggled right through, and with a push from Britta, she was shooting past the rest of their blockers to take the lead just as Britta lost her balance and hit the floor, with the other blocker half on top of her.

The whole sequence had taken a couple of seconds, and it was one of the smoothest moves Britta had ever pulled off. She didn't even feel it when she hit the floor, just crawled out from under her opponent and grinned as she hauled her ass around the track to catch up with her pack again. She was still grinning when Perkins called off the jam and she skated back to the team bench.

She got a slap on the helmet and a "Good work" from Shirley, too, as they passed each other. Once, Britta might have resented that kind of praise from her, feeling patronized or something. But as they shared a quick grin before Shirley lined up for the next jam, Britta only felt pride.

*

Shirley was the first of the two of them to take to roller derby, funnily enough. Britta would have thought she'd have enough on her plate setting up her business, not to mention that Shirley was the last person Britta would expect to join a community full of punks, queers and atheists of her own volition. She needed some time away from the kids, though, she said, and especially away from her husband now that they were working on the store together, and this seemed like just the thing.

Britta was deeply skeptical about the whole thing, but she'd gone along when Shirley asked her to come to her first practice for moral support. "Why _roller derby_?" She'd asked, exasperated, in the car on the way to the rink. "Isn't it, like... full of girls in hot pants and fishnets?"

"Didn't you used to judge me for looking down on girls in hot pants and fishnets?"

"Yeah, but... it seems like it's a sport that's all about pandering to guys who want to watch scantily-clad women beat each other up." Britta frowned.

"Well, some of those girls might make some... questionable choices about their lives," Shirley said, pursing her lips as she turned into the carpark across from the scrubby rink. "But if you think skating's so easy that you'd do this just to look sexy and cool, then you've never been on skates."

Shirley, it turned out, _had_ been on skates, and had evidently done it a _lot_. Britta didn't know what she expected when they entered the building, and after she and Shirley had met a few other skaters and shaken some hands, she had to admit these roller girls looked pretty nice. But when she took her seat in the empty bleachers as Shirley laced up an old pair of white, calf-high skates, so different from the sleek black leather the rest of the girls were sporting, she certainly didn't think Shirley was going to keep up.

Shirley didn't just keep up with the others. She smashed them. She might not have been up to the speed of the others, but she mastered every trick they threw at her without a hitch. By the end of the session, they were even letting her do some contact drills, and while she wasn't great at throwing hits yet, even the veterans were having trouble shifting her when she planted her feet.

Britta knew she wasn't going to be as good as Shirley was at her first skate. But she tried, and failed, and tried again, and she got there.

Well. She was getting there.

*

"Let me jam."

Their bench coach glanced away from the skaters lining up and frowned. “I'll talk to you in a minute, Knees.”

They both watched the jammer line as both teams waited, a tangle of blockers jostling each other and two star-branded jammer helmets at the back, until the jam start whistle blew and all ten of them moved forward in a clatter of wheels and shouting.

“I have Frankenfearless down to jam next,” said the coach, without taking her eyes off the pack. “You’ll get your turn.”

Britta grit her teeth and tried to bite back the rant about the tyranny of meritocracy and how only giving your best skaters jam time in scrimmage defeated the entire point of scrimmage. “She’s had three jams already, though, and we’ve only got two more before half time, at most.”

They weren’t running the scoreboard this afternoon, leaving time and scoring to Michelle and her army of NSOs, but the coach cut her eyes to the clock on the wall for a moment and looked a little surprised. She opened her mouth, and for a moment Britta was sure she was going to say yes, but then their jammer got overtaken and the coach was shouting “Call it! Call it!” with Britta’s urge to jam apparently forgotten.

Britta didn’t ask for much. She was still pretty new to gameplay and she knew she still had some work to do getting better at blocking, but she hardly ever got a good chance to jam. They were getting towards the end of the first half, and she didn’t want to sit there waiting her turn until the margin was so huge it didn’t make a difference – or if the score stayed close, miss out a chance to jam at all. She got the desire to win, fuck, she wanted to win, but she wanted to know what it felt like to score, not just to throw a hit or to take one. Derby was bringing out something she’d always tried to tamp down before. How much she wanted to win, and how much she wanted the spotlight and the glory.

She was so caught up in the unfairness of it all that she almost missed the helmet cover getting shoved into her hands at the end of the jam and the words “You’re up, Knees.”

Britta barely had time to blink before she was crouched at the line, facing a wall of opposition blocker’s butts. This wasn’t like waiting for the first jam whistle of the bout, when her head was full of thoughts, and it wasn’t like rest of the time she was blocking, once she’d gotten into the headspace for it. This time, as she waited for the whistle, her mind was completely blank with the shock of suddenly getting shoved into exactly what she wanted.

But she heard the jam start whistle over the white noise in her head, launched herself forward to try to find a gap between the wall of shoulders and tried to ignore the panic in her head and remember that she’d done this before.

It started off badly. The other jammer, Boots, slipped easily past her teammates and was forcing her way past Britta’s while Britta herself was still struggling to make headway. She tried attacking towards the inside line when they hit the apex, just as Boots had, but found herself bumped from both sides by a couple of blockers and almost lost her balance altogether, definitely losing all the momentum she had to push.

The referee's whistle sounded, signifying that the other jammer had broken through the pack to get lead status, and Britta chewed at her mouthguard in frustration as she tried to find her way through for a first pass. But her blockers were switching to defense now, slowing down and getting their shoulders into the white team's blockers too, trying to break up the wall and find her a way through. Then, finally, as they came out of another apex and onto the straight, she saw a gap, up to the outside of the track. Britta barged her way through, as her teammates held the other team back, and almost made a clean break for it. The blocker on her right kept pace with her, though, trying to hold her back and get around her, force her off the track. For just a second, with all the pushing and shoving, Britta forgot that she was the jammer this time around, and surged against the other girl with a perfect hip check, knocking her clean off the track.

 _Hey, it worked,_ she thought to herself, as she pushed her wheels into the hard floor with all she had, pounding her way around the apex and back to the pack. There were whistles and arguments going on, she could here, standard penalties getting called, and normally she might care but she was out of the pack and there were points for the taking if she could catch up to Boots, and for just this couple of seconds all she cared about was getting back around the track as fast as possible.

Then, too soon, she was coming up the straightaway with a wall of blockers coming up faster than she'd expected. Not a wall that was going to stop her, though. Two of the white blockers in the penalty box, all four of her girls ready to take them on, and that was all she needed to skate full speed ahead like she didn't have a fear in the world. Boots was still in there, fighting her way past the blockers in black, by the time Britta got there, but goddamn, Britta was not going to leave this jam without a point.

Boots called it off before Britta could clear the pack, of course. It was the only sensible thing to do. It was the last jam of the half, too, as it turned out, so by the time she drifted off the track, her teammates were already picking up all their things to switch benches. But she glanced back over her shoulder as she skated over to join her teammates and knew nothing could dampen her swelling sense of pride when she saw her jam ref holding up three fingers.

"Should have been four points," she complained, when her teammates all crowded around to slap her helmet. "I totally got past the second blocker, too."

"You sure did," Shirley said, and grabbed her round the shoulders in a hug that was almost a headlock. "And next time we'll make sure you get eight."

"Well, I don't know about..."

"Hey, coach!" Shirley yelled, and the coach looked up. "Next time you put Fake Plastic Knees here on to jam, you make sure you put me in the pack. I'm gonna get my girl the lead."

"I'll consider it," their coach said, dryly, but Britta thought she let out a hint of a smile before she turned back to her clipboard.

"You were awesome!" Slam Perkins said, giving her another slap on the back.

"You think?" Britta blinked at her. It had been a good jam and all, but Slam was one of the more experienced jammers at Greendale. She kicked ass.

"Hell yeah!" Slam hugged her and then turned around to the rest of the team. "Hey, didn't everyone see that hit Britta put on Rocket? We got a jammer you don't want to chase right here!"

This was worth staying in Greendale for, Britta thought, as her teammates all chimed in to agree. This was worth still being here, even when Annie and Abed had moved away, chasing bigger, brighter futures. When a lot of her friends from before Greendale were off travelling the world, too. When it felt like it would be ages before she held down a solid job, when she didn't know whether she was really helping anyone with her casework or whether she was just moving them through the system. She'd always thought that she was bad at making friends with women, that there was something wrong with her, something about womanhood she just didn't get. It turned out it had just taken a pair of skates and a lot of shoving before she found the right pack of girls. Maybe she'd always have more to learn, but she'd found a place where it was worth doing for its own sake.

She'd have to finish that epiphany later, though, because the referees called for them to start the second half, and she had to take her place on the track.


End file.
